Journal article
Geostrophic and chimney regimes in rotating horizontal convection with imposed heat flux
CA Vreugdenhil, RW Griffiths, B Gayen
Journal of Fluid Mechanics | CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS | Published : 2017
DOI: 10.1017/jfm.2017.249
Abstract
Convection in a rotating rectangular basin with differential thermal forcing at one horizontal boundary is examined using laboratory experiments. The experiments have an imposed heat flux boundary condition, are at large values of the flux Rayleigh number ( based on the box length ), use water with Prandtl number and have a small depth to length aspect ratio. The results show the conditions for transition from non-rotating horizontal convection governed by an inertial-buoyancy balance in the thermal boundary layer, to circulation governed by geostrophic flow in the boundary layer. The geostrophic balance constrains mean flow and reduces the heat transport as Nusselt number , where is the con..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank T. Beasley, B. Tranter and A. Rummery for construction of equipment and laboratory assistance. We thank Dr A. Kiss for providing helpful comments on calculating the transport from horizontal velocity fields. The particle tracking velocimetry was analysed using Streams 2.01 software, for which we thank Dr R. Nokes. The research was supported by Australian Research Council grant DP140103706, C.A.V. was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award granted by the Australian Government Research Training Program and B.G. was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Fellowship DE140100089.